It’s over... It’s all over...
In addition to the harsh weight loss, Yabuki’s strike to his temple in the sixth round and the rope’s blow to the back of his head when he went down caused a cerebral hemorrhage...
Now that I think about it, that fight wasn’t even a title match or anything, was it?
Sorry, this is no time to be messing around.
Firstly, I apologize for how long it took to get this out. There were delays up until the very end.
To come clean, I was actually supposed to have finished this manuscript in December 2002. The first half was already written, so the hope was that if things went well, we could release them both together, but...
My health took a turn for the worse right after I finished writing the first part. When the first part came out, the publisher asked me, “Can we announce part two coming out around summer?” and I said, “Yes, I’ll try to finish it by then...” but I didn’t get better for a long time...
My writing pace slowed considerably, but I couldn’t just drop my magazine work, so I ended up focusing on that pretty much completely.
Actually, I think I started feeling unwell the year before last, really...
So while I was carrying on working pretending that my body wasn’t broken, it eventually broke enough that I couldn’t work, you see. I finally learned something that even a child could figure out.
I know I have no way to apologize to those who were looking forward to this work, but I’m sorry all the same.
In any case.
This volume marks the end of the Orphen series.
Firstly, please allow me to thank everyone who was involved in this series and everyone who was involved with Akita without being involved in the series. Thank you so much.
I’m sure there are those of you who know this, but this series started ten years ago at this point, getting this far on the author’s uncertain steps. So many people supported me and I caused them trouble at every turn, but even a pathetic creator like me has gotten this far without running away... Those are the kind of shameful things I think about myself.
But anyway, since I have the opportunity, I figure I’ll talk about how this series came about, at my editor’s request.
I won Fujimi Shobo’s third Fantasia Novel Award for new authors. In 2003, they’ll be giving out this award for the fifteenth time. So it’s been twelve years since I won my award.
I think I talked about this in an interview once, but at the time I was in high school and I worked part-time to save up for an MSX (a PC that was already on the way out at the time) and submitted a story I wrote as typing practice on the word processor included on the machine (that was how it started, really).
The really amazing thing about that is that one file in that word processor was only the size of about twelve sheets of manuscript paper. So it took me over thirty files just to write one book. If I wanted to add one line, I might have to edit ten plus files individually if I was unlucky. How ludicrous.
Anyway, I think the story I submitted was probably the first thing in my life that I actually wrote from start to finish... Wait, that’s not what I wanted to say. People get this wrong a lot, but that story wasn’t the first volume of the Orphen series.
It was a completely different book. And after I debuted with that book, I took story proposals into the publisher for about two years. I was a student at the time, so things were easy in that sense, but I think I brought them five or six different ideas (and I wrote more than that considering all the ideas I threw out myself...) I wrote SF-type stuff and mystery-type stuff and it was definitely fun, but my editor always gave me a sour look when I brought my stories in.
“I mean, I won’t say they’re boring, but... How should I say this? There’s a certain kind of fun that anime and manga have, right? Can you make something like that?”
I see, I thought, and I tried to think of something, but...
Huh.
There wasn’t really a reason, but I suddenly stopped watching TV after I started middle school.
When I was about twenty, I bought a TV for my place (again without any particular reason) and started watching it, but I had this long gap in my knowledge of TV and entertainment for those years when I wasn’t watching. I didn’t know any of the anime my editor brought up as examples for me. The only anime I knew was the mecha war stuff I watched a lot in grade school...
Fortunately, right when I heard that advice, a new series of that anime I’d watched as a child was airing. It was a story about a family living in a crazy palace with horns fighting a war of independence against the Earth Federation... It was like, this is sad, but this is what war’s like... Anyway, it was a new series like that and it was pretty great. It had like, a space battleship with tires that went, “Now I can trample everything on the surface.”
I watched the show in the evenings and went, “I see. A story like this.” My brain was festering.
Thus.
I got the idea for a story where magic users flew around in space and shot beams at each other and locked blades and shouted lines like that.
I gave up on the space part quickly enough... I thought it made sense to do so, but at the same time, I kind of wish I hadn’t.
“For the protagonist... I guess I can’t make it the white Federation guy, can I... Black, then. Black works.”
Here’s something I’ve never told anyone, or rather, I’ve kept hidden.
People asked me a few times when the series started why I didn’t write sorcerer in the normal way. Of course, part of it is just because I think the normal characters are uncool, but the truth is that the last character comes from that anime.
I had some of the stories I’d rejected myself before bringing them to the publisher at the time, so I took some of the characters and pieces of the setting and changed them up into the first volume of this series. I’ve said this in an interview too, but Orphan (that was his name at first) was a subcharacter in the original story, a wisecracking magic user. The model for the character was that one guy, with the hourglass eyes.
When I wrote the first one, I had no intention of continuing it, but my editor suddenly told me, “write the next one too, just in case,” so I kind of panicked. At the time, I had already graduated and gotten a job. But I was still in training at the time and going home early, so things weren’t that different from when I was a student. I somehow managed to think up the story for volume two on. Having to expand a story that was finished meant I was better off ignoring most of the stuff I’d established in volume one, so that’s just what I did with volume two.
Around then, the first volume went on sale and luckily it was well-received, so I ended up being able to write volume three as well. But I was starting to get busy at work. Plus, I was an operator at a printing company, so I was going home in the middle of the night as a matter of course (I’m so thankful to the people whose job it is to make this manuscript into a book). Having no other choice, I would go home late, write until morning, go to work, and then sleep on my lunch break, and that’s how I wrote volume three, but...
Naturally, I couldn’t carry on like that forever, so I quit my job sometime around when I was writing volume six, I think. At that time, I began to focus completely on this job.
And so with all that, I wrote this series for nine years. Almost ten years now. In terms of the world at large, it’s only a mere ten years, but it was a lot of fun for me. I never cease to be dissatisfied with my inexperience, and there’s probably been more pain than pleasure on the whole, but it was a lot of fun.
That’s what I think looking back at it now. I can only hope that my readers have enjoyed it too.
Phew.
Well, I went against my own policy and wrote a lot about my work. It’s a little mortifying, but it was a good opportunity, so.
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who helped get me here once more as well. I think I’ll probably start a new series after this, so I hope you’ll join me in that one as well.
Huh? There’s more Reckless left?
...Shit. There’s one book left!
Yoshinobu Akita, August 2003